Raptor RAID setup for PS - how to break the bank nicely...?

[shawngibson]

That's also what I am doing, sort of, my current machine will be my website server (as it was for a while already) and will get the parts as I remove them from the Photoshop machine...

[shawngibson]

This is REALLY important for me, I am buying the stuff as soon as the checque is cut at work, was supposed to be today. Does anyone know of a Socket 939 board that can take more than 4 Gb of RAM? I will go the +4800 X2 route if yes, but I looked and looked and did not find one.

 

Yes I am over my head, I don't pretend to be a hardware guy at all, I use these things, want a really good setup finally, and have been trying to learn. All things pointed me to a quad. I just want to run CS2 AND hypothetical true 64 bit CS3/4 very well. That's all I care about.

 

X2+8Gb RAM capable for tomorrow

 

dual 270 Opterons

 

...I really don't care what, as long as it is SCALABLE.

 

My computer guy is going to hate me LOL. No wonder I seemed to be making his day...

[EricM]

"unless of course someone can point me to a Socket 939 board that will let me add more than 4 RAM for when PS goes 64bit"

 

you mean hopefully we'll be able to buy 2 gig sticks for four slots by then?

[nicolas_burtnyk]

Scalability in this sense is kinda BS.

Buy what you need now and wory about later later.

I went down the same road as you about 8 years ago and spent a bunch of cash and got a machine that had great specs and that I could upgrade. It worked great then and is still a good linux box now, but overall it didn't really pan out like I had planned.

When it comes time to add the 2nd CPU in or 2 years, you will be adding a 2nd obsolete CPU. There will be better boards, RAM and N-core CPUs then. And they'll be cheaper.

 

Again, I would get a socket 939 board, X2 4800+, 4 GB RAM, decent drives and a nice screen (you could probably get a 30" apple or dual 24's for the $$ saved on the opterons and tyan board).

[shawngibson]

Fine, I've heard enough. I'll get an X2. Thanks for saving my ass.

 

It also means faster RAM, no EEC, no regestered stuff...

[wayne_haas]

Shawn,

 

Am glad you weren't offended, I just hate to see people expend their money unnecessarily :-)

 

From the way it sounds, you actually haven't the motherboard and CPUs in hand yet or made an irreversible commitment? If so, you may actually want to reconsider the Tyan MB and the Opterons. Those level of components are intended for servers/production workstations and thus likely overkill for your needs. You may well get by easily with a single AMD 64 X2 CPU such as the 3800+ Venice core -- or the 4400+ Toledo core variant if you feel somewhat richer -- and a different MB and save yourself considerable coin.

 

One of your stated goals is to put together a system that will make full use of 64bit Photoshop whenever it becomes available. If that doesn't happen for two or three years, just imagine what advances will be made in computer hardware in that same timespan. It is probable that the current high-end hardware will be low-end by then -- 'future proofing' is generally a 'fool's errand' in the computer market. Unless there is a justifiable need for 'bleeding edge' (a very apt term money-wise) now, it is more cost effective to buy components a level or two below the current high end.

 

If you do decide to pursue RAID options, be aware that controllers integrated on the motherboard often aren't the best and usually are software rather than hardware-based solutions. What this means in simple terms is that while both types have a hardware base, software controllers use the CPU to perform most of the RAID calculations. Hardware-based controllers have their own processors which reduces CPU loading, and often their own dedicated RAM. Of note here is that cheap RAID cards are generally software based; hardware based cards are generally quite pricey (i.e., $US 350+). An advantage of either is that if down the road you move to a different motherboard, you don't run the risk of your RAID array being unreadable because of incompatibility with a different controller.

 

Just food for thought; and perhaps the reason why many of us are recommending the standard three drive option -- follows the KISS principle ;-)

[shawngibson]

Thanks Wayne. I'm noting very crazy prices on SCSI drives. I think Raptors are going to have to work (it's one thing to spend $1200 Cdn on drives, but SCSI seems to be WAY more than that...). I am having a very difficult time translating 'a good OS, a good scratch, and a good data' setup here. Too much information. I'll have to keep reading slowly so everything sinks in.

 

Shawn

[Uhooru]

Why not just get a powermac quad? Killer machine,with 250 GB and 2 gigs of ram and an ACD 20inch screen. All 4 $4600.USD, spend another 400 and add a small fast HD for scratch and a Large HD for image storage. Cheap eh:) Really listen to Scott and these other guys, you are way overbuilding.

[chiswick_john]

Shawn - everything you are saying in this thread leads me to believe you are about to make a big decision and spend a lot of money but you realy don't understand what you are getting into. Take a step back, get some more advice - you will save yourself a heap of money and get something that works for you. Building a system from components is a minefield if you don't know what you are doing and building for future expansion is throwing money away.

[beauh44]

Did anyone mention <a href="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/multLevel01-c.html">RAID 1+0??</a> Which is supposedly better than RAID 0+1 and if you don't believe me <a href="http://www.ofb.net/~jheiss/raid10/">this should make your head hurt!</a> <P>

 

Shawn the people who *really* know this stuff are typically network systems engineers - guys with their MCSE and that kinda stuff. Although they typically buy systems from Dell, Compaq or HP instead of trying to build them from the ground up, they should still know what's hot in the RAID subsystem market. I used to a million years ago but just can't keep up with it anymore.

 

By the way you could just buy many of these systems pre-configured at pretty good prices and save yourself a few gray hairs. But I understand... Some people love their motherboards! ;-)

[scott_eaton]

{Laugh} I woulnd't let an MCSE wash my laundry. I've spent too much time re-building their crap to consider that cert to mean anything.

 

I really think a Toledo X2 processor is the best bang for the buck.

 

Question for everybody; even assuming Windows XP 64 and CS2, would RAM over 2 or 4 gig provide any benefit? Have I been not payin attention, or have we broke that barrier on the Windows platform running Photoshop?

[claytontullos]

I happen to have 2 74gb raptors in Raid0, the performance is excellent.

 

Mine maintain 110mb/s read speed through out the length of the drive.

 

One raptors read speed tops out at around 70mb/s.

[kelly_flanigan1]

<a href="http://www.monitor.ca/monitor/issues/vol5iss2/eosstuff.html"><i>For the really cool stuff, Photoshop 4.0 includes a plug-in to speed up most operations by accessing the MMX instruction set of the Pentium II and the P55C. While MMX support is definitely a boon, the real power geek feature has to be the fact that this application is built from the ground up to take advantage of SMP hardware on both the NT/Intel and Macintosh platforms. <b>Obviously, the dream machine for Photoshop has to be a dual Pentium II NT Workstation with 0.25 to 0.50 GB of RAM. Ahh, to dream...(Sept 1997)</b></i></a><BR><BR>I think multithreading was added with PS4. Here I have dabbled with dual CPU boxes. <BR><BR>OK My dumb question to Scott and the group is: does a dual <b>core</b> CPU have any hooks, software to see if the other core is really helping at all or alot, for a task? Ie with a dual CPU box one can see the both CPU's usage With task manager during some games, and with other programs the second CPU does little. Other than timed performance tests is there a software hook, app to peak at the dual core CPU to see the sharing, or loafing? :) Yea a really poorly worded question!

[sean de merchant httpw]

Kelly,

 

From everything I have seen dual core shows up as two CPU's to XP. The only example I have seen was a messed up box with 3 cores (1 dual core + 1 single core + BIOS issues)and it showed 3 CPUs as that is the norm for XP. So, yes, one should be able to measure/see a difference as it happens.

 

And PS 4 just flew on a dual PII 266 with 0.5 GB of RAM. It was a dream machine. Too bad 7 years later it would be a rather slow but robust machine. I am glad it was not my money that paid for it.

 

Shawn,

 

If you are going to run XP-64, then go for at least 6 GB RAM. The reason, you can make PS stop writing to the scratch disk and use the OS'es disk cache if you have 6+ GB of RAM. This will yield more speedup than faster disk for all but the largest of images.

 

SCSI is overkill for your needs, you should be able to get by with SATA/SATA II drives without any major loss of performance.

 

Also, two 74 GB Raptors in RAID 0 will give you 144 GB of storage.

 

But as far as future proofing goes, spend 1/3 as much today, 1/3 as much in two years, and 1/3 as much in 4 years and you will get way more power of an unlikely 6 year lifespan of such a workstation. And if transistor density continues to grow at the rate it grows today (Moore's Law), then we will have 16 times the computing power per dollar we have today in just 6 years.

 

Heck, todays $500 systems can compete with bleeding edge boxes from 3 years ago. Why, faster memory and faster disk.

 

some thoughts,

 

Sean (who still thinks it would be a fun box to have).

[pixelator]

The Task Manager Performance tab will show the CPU utilization for both cores in a dual-core system.<p>

 

Take a look at <a href="http://www.kevinmillsphoto.com/Articles/WorkstationFrame.html">this article</a> that I wrote. It describes the building of my Photoshop workstation. I have 4 Raptors setup in two RAID-0 sets, one for the OS, one for the PS Scratch. I also have two 320GB drives in RAID-0 for my working space. Everything gets backed up to external HDDs. So far, I've been pleased as punch with it's performance.<p><p>

 

Best,<p>

Kevin

[beauh44]

[Laugh} Scott doesn't know the ones I do, does he? I guess I'm a bit skeptical of anyone who says learning something's a waste of time.

 

Sure some people "memorize" the tests and suck - they're usually salesmen who have little tech experience anyway. Some people take the tests over and over and never pass. If you're already a decent tech and have had good training, the preparations for the tests can pay off. But Scott's right in that certification doesn't guarantee someone's good any more than going to medical school makes you a brilliant surgeon.

 

Being certified doesn't teach someone how to think but if nothing else it does teach product knowledge simply because the vendors want people in the business aware of the features and benefits of their current products, which just happens to often include exactly what's being discussed in this thread. If you want to remain certified you must periodically re-take the tests, many of which are not easy I might add.

 

The certification tests are quite cleverly designed "adaptive" tests; the "smarter" you are the harder the questions get. (But the fewer questions you get asked) In fact it might be entertaining to see how Scott might do!

 

Many people who are certified must be because certain products can only be sold through certain channels and there must be knowledgeable people around to fix them when things go wrong. The customers of some of these products need very high performance machines designed to shovel huge quantities of data (like banks for example) which I believe are the qualities Shawn is looking for, perhaps on a bit smaller scale. Operating systems today have dozens of performance tweaks that can help, many of which are obscure registry hacks and aren't widely known because some are vendor-specific.

 

It's just two schools of thought really: You can go buy motherboards, power supplies, cases, video adapters, hard disk controllers, RAID arrays and RAM. You can update BIOSes from websites, cuss drivers, diagnose faulty cables, get RMA numbers, return parts, install operating systems and stay on "ignore" with some tech from Pakistan and hang out on Photonet asking Scott what to do. Some people *like* to do this kind of stuff and I understand - that's cool.

 

I'd rather take pictures myself. To each his own I guess.

[shawngibson]

This is from the Adobe Optimizing Photoshop page:

 

"If you have more than 4 GB (to 6 GB), the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data. Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop, is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can speed performance of Photoshop. "

 

It seems to me that even a single Opteron dual-core 280 is a better solution than an X2 because Photoshop can access a lot of ram if it is there. With an X2 setup, you are Socket 939, and I to this day have not found a +4Gb motherboard or one that supports DDR2 with 2x4Gb RAM sticks.

 

All of the benchmarks I have seen show the quad Opteron setups as blindingly fast for Photoshop, and indeed the X2's often don't do even as well as other single dual-core setups.

 

I'm trying to listen to people because I'm a bit out of my league here, but nothing so far has pointed me to X2 solution as 'the best' for Photoshop, because if I only get one dual-core on a Socket 939, I am stuck with 4Gb of RAM. With XP 64, the above quote seems to note a lot of the RAID Raptor craziness from this post won't even be necessary, IF I go even a single Socket 940 Opteron which gives me motherboards with a lot more RAM available if needed (I believe only after buying a second proc, but that's the point: buy if needed and shove it in).

 

I am supposed to be buying this stuff today. I am getting very frustrated (if nothing else, a proc/board purchase or 2 Opterons or X2 plus mb plus ram etc.).

[kelly_flanigan1]

Here I have used PS since version 2.5 . Adobes recomendations about ram, scratch drives, etc need to be taken with a grain of salt and questioned. Doing your own tests with your type of files is alot more usefull. Sometimes their info is accurate, but abit stale for the current hardware. Their scratch disc recomendations with many of my computers has done nothing or actually slowed down the computer with PS. Finding out the bottlenecks in a system can be fun! :)

[alexdi]

Shawn,

<p>

Forget hard drives.

<p>

Photoshop is all about CPU and RAM. If you run out of the latter, it'll slow down no matter what drives you've setup.

<P>

If you REALLY, TRULY want no bottlenecks, buy two of these:

<p>

<b><a href=http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/>Gigabyte iRAM</a></b>

<p>

.. throw 8 GB of RAM apiece at them, and stripe with RAID-0. That's 16 GB of zero-latency scratch disk with 300 MB/sec of throughput. OR, for a similar price, stripe 4 of them with 4 GB apiece for 600 MB/sec throughput.

<P>

I couldn't tell you which CPU is the quickest in PS, but I CAN say that a 16 GB RAM disk, with 6 GB of standard system RAM, will be unbeatable by any hard disk combination.

<P>

DI

[sean de merchant httpw]

The iRam will make little performance difference with PS. The speed is limited by the data bus and it is only a small bit faster than a Raptor for far more money. And seek times are not terribly relevant to PS work unless you have a nearly full badly fragmented scratch disk. If the scratch disk files are not fragmented, then seek times are not relevant as tens milliseconds of seek times will not affect how long it takes to read or write 300 MB of data at 50-70 MB per second. This solution greatly interested me, but sadly after looking into it and reading up on it it turned out to not be significant to PS performance. The only way it might help is if you increased total system RAM and used the iRam as a holder for the RAM you removed to increase your total memory.

 

With this system, just buying more RAM and getting a software RAMDisk solution would yield much higher performance (GB per second rather than many MB per second).

 

some thoughts,

 

Sean

[EricM]

i remember when none of this had absolutely anything to do with photography. now it's flash websites, super computers, software, e-commerce, seo, emails, pdf's...blimey I sometimes miss just getting dressed up and just presenting a portfolio and shooting e-6.

[alexdi]

Sean,

<p>

<i>seek times are not terribly relevant to PS work unless you have a nearly full badly fragmented scratch disk.. seek times will not affect how long it takes to read or write 300 MB of data at 50-70 MB per second.</I>

<p>

Scratch data is not strictly sequential. And it isn't just hard disk fragmentation that's a problem; the contents of the page file itself are easily fragmented when you start playing with multiple documents.

<p>

This is nontrivial with large files. A modern CPU can do ten million operations within the latency of each hard disk seek.

<p>

They say not to put Photoshop on the same disk that's used for scratch. You can throw that out the window with an iRAM; because finding data has essentially zero latency, there is no performance degradation.

<p>

<i>it turned out to not be significant to PS performance.</I>

<p>

So Anandtech concluding in a half paragraph without a word on methodology. I feel this is invalid.

<P>

1) Saving files, startup times, this is all irrelevant.

<P>

2) Shawn is in the unique situation of working with files that need MORE than 4 GB of memory. It would take 5 drives in RAID-0 to get anywhere near two iRAMs in pure throughput, and they certainly wouldn't do it consistently. The numbers become ridiculous if you want the 600 MB/sec that four iRAMs would offer, inside a single case, with zero noise.

<p>

<i>

With this system, just buying more RAM and getting a software RAMDisk solution would yield much higher performance.</i>

<p>

No, for a number of reasons.

<P>

1) Physical limits in the amount of RAM the system can hold. Most cap out between 4 and 8 GB. A 4-way RAID array with 250 GB of space implies a larger requirement.

<P>

2) Limits to what CS2 can directly address. On Windows systems, this is about 3.5 GB.

<P>

3) There are anecdotal reports that RAM disks don't work as expected with Photoshop. Mine doesn't even show in the scratch disk selection box.

<p>

To sum, I think an iRAM or four is absolutely worth a look.

<p>

DI

[sean de merchant httpw]

<p>David,</p>

 

<p>At this point in time, the iram is vaporware, I have yet to find a retailer with them stocked. This is a major issue. Add in that the manufacturer's samples also came with notes saying not to use them in RAID configurations due to bugs in the FPGA plus their limit of 4 GB of RAM a piece and they become small and limited. One 4 GB one might make an awesome cache store for Bridge (a database without seek times).</p>

 

<p><i>Scratch data is not strictly sequential. And it isn't just hard disk fragmentation that's a problem; the contents of the page file itself are easily fragmented when you start playing with multiple documents.</i></p>

 

<p>So long as your image actually fits in RAM the only scratch disk access you have is the writing of history states to disk. This tends to be highly sequential. If page file fragmentation is an issue, then quit and restart.</p>

 

<p>Also, with multi-GB images, fragmented chunks of data are still likely to be on the order of 50+MB per chunk. So again, adding on 10 or 20 milliseconds to a 1 second operation will not have a real time effect on the user (it might add up in batch operations, but many people enjoy coffee breaks).</p>

 

<p><i>They say not to put Photoshop on the same disk that's used for scratch. You can throw that out the window with an iRAM; because finding data has essentially zero latency, there is no performance degradation.</i></p>

 

<p>The problem is not just seek times but bandwidth. Use two physically separate SATA channels you can theoretically get twice the bandwidth using PCI-Express Lanes (not on the PCI bus which is bandwidth limited). The PCI-X slots on the chosen board should be able to surpass this limit too. Whereas a single iRam will only have the available bandwidth of a single connection SATA data path. Hence, using 4 drives (OS, swap, data, PS Scratch Disk) would remove the per SATA connector contention as each activity would only go to one place.</p>

 

<p><i>1) Saving files, startup times, this is all irrelevant.</i></p>

 

<p> They are, and the testing methodology was documented. A small percentage faster than a single Raptor and slower than a pair of Raptors in RAID 0 for more than the cost of 2 Raptors means saving and loading files can be done faster for less money with RAID 0. </p>

 

<p>As for fast startup, who cares if you can turn the 15 seconds it takes to start the OS into 9 seconds, the 15+ seconds spent POSTing means even a 1 second boot time off the disk would not even halve the time it takes to boot from power on. And saving 6 seconds (15->9) on boot simply means instead of 30 seconds it takes 24 seconds from power on to login screen. Not a significant difference.</p>

 

<p><i>Shawn is in the unique situation of working with files that need MORE than 4 GB of memory. It would take 5 drives in RAID-0 to get anywhere near two iRAMs in pure throughput, and they certainly wouldn't do it consistently. The numbers become ridiculous if you want the 600 MB/sec that four iRAMs would offer, inside a single case, with zero noise.</i></p>

 

<p>Again, the product is not qualified for RAID operation by the manufacturer. So that matters little. Plus he is buying a motherboard that supports 16 GB of RAM, so why not use it. So long as the OS uses the RAM for disk cache and you have the right PS switches set, then you should be able fly without touching disk.</p>

 

<p>If and when the iRam reaches the market at a sub $200 price it might be worthwhile to buy one, shove 2 GB of RAM into it and upgrade to 4 GB of RAM. Add in that even the best deal for 16-1GB sticks of DDR will run $1200 US for a great deal. Add $900 US for the iRams and you reach $2100 US. Yet you can get 8-36GB Raptors in 4 RAID 0 arrays for less money and have higher performance and more storage plus a 16 channel 64-bit 133 MHz PCI-X SATA RAID controller. Albeit, this would also require a much more powerful power supply or external self powered SATA drive enclosures. </p>

 

<p>And the real deal breaker. While the motherboard may support 16 GB of RAM (expensive registered ECC DDR DIMM), the motherboard also has only a single 32-bit 33MHz PCI v2.3 so it would only hold a single iRam at most.</p>

 

<p>I looked at this long and hard and finally realized no matter how cool SSD sounded, the iRam was not up to snuff (no RAID, cannot buy, slower and costlier than a RAID 0 pair). The tech is cool and the price for entry into SSD is cheap. But the reality is conventional solutions perform better at lower cost. </p>

 

<p>In the end, at the price point of 4-4GB iRams one could build a decent 8 or 12 drive RAID array. I also believe that with a high end controller one can put more than 2 drives in a RAID 0 array. So 12 drive could become 3 very fast logical drives. Or 2 fast logical drives (2 RAID 0 pairs) and one insanely fast (8 drives striped for performance) logical drive. <p>

 

<p>more thoughts,</p>

 

<p>Sean</p>

[alexdi]

I read the note about RAID-0. Toms Hardware heavily benchmarked this arrangement without issue, and I'm inclined to believe it's functional. Gigabyte's been very good about driver support in the past, and I expect they'll correct whatever problems it may have shortly. Much of your response contests this, and I'll leave it as a difference of opinion.

<p>

<i>Again, the product is not qualified for RAID operation by the manufacturer. So that matters little. Plus he is buying a motherboard that supports 16 GB of RAM, so why not use it. So long as the OS uses the RAM for disk cache and you have the right PS switches set, then you should be able fly without touching disk.</I>

<P>

Really, I'm running into two problems.

<P>

1) I don't like hard disks. I have six of them in my system now, most in RAID, and I'd love to trade them for quick, quiet, and less failure-prone storage. 12 10,000 RPM Raptors in RAID-0 would be a monumentally unpleasant experience. Unless the system is in a physically different room, this is highly impractical.

<P>

2) Regardless of how much main memory he has, Photoshop will use only 3 GB. That's it. To get around that, he must use scratch, and for reasons of both speed and real-world practicality, I continue to favor the iRAM. Presuming they ever ship the damn thing, as you point out. Perhaps they'll upgrade to SATA-2 in the next revision.

<P>

DI

[will goodman]

Shawn starting another CPU thread without me. And that MCSE crack wasn't very nice. I can do laundry and work on systems just not fix a car... Shawn i will email you another system for you to look at.

 

 

Will G.